Random updates

News: Team Verve won the North American Rogaining Championships! We were Nikolay Nachev and Peteris Ledins. 

The race was extremely hard - hot and somewhat on the high side of the world (~2000 meters). Nikolay did the perfect navigation for the first 12 hours; we came back to the hash house after which we had some issues. Those of navigation type during night and heat ones during the second light. We lost some 2 hours at night and some more during slow-slow walking closer to finish. I'm happy Nikolay made it to the end. 

Pluses - extremely good navigation during first half, lucky with water controls (one critical ran out of water later in the day). 

Negatives that can be improved - we were somewhat on the disorganized side of the racing, went too fast during first day, endurence issues later.  

Random issues - I had horrible headache during first day for me with some blood dripping out of my nose, Nikolay rolled his ankle around 14:00 (running started at 11:00) and he could not run after night (pretty bad heat issues). 

We thought we were out of the race for championship around 5 am, so we just wanted to get back. Turns out we won. 

Our map can be seen at Nikolay's attackpoint post.

Older stuff: speaking on prizes from Desert Winds - we got really nice shirts from Axis Gear and the large map holder, which goes to Miles! Why? Because I already have one of exactly those! It is the best map holder I have ever seen. It can be bought here, just in case someone wonders. There were also some other smaller prizes that included some Nuun tablets (my hydration!) and also Hammer gel (this is Murray's favourite, but both of them are yum-yum for me as well). 

Finally: Team Verve is going for Trioba sprint next; comparing to our Desert Winds line-up Miles is replaced by Ian Hoag, a very experienced racer. We just did a run+bike training of around 3 hours, half run/half bike. The location was Tiger Mt.; Murray, Ian, Nikolay and I did the run with Christi joining for the bike ride (was it a ride?) and Nikolay dropping as after the run. Run was dry while the bike was wet-wet-wet (which is rather nice when you see so much of desert laterly). We parked our cars at Sunset drive parking spot, rode to electricity lines, went passed the main Tiger Mt trail parking spot; hiked the bikes through some long grass with mud under us, reached river, carried our bikes across and then carried, dragged, pushed and pulled them through the PNW green forest for some 15 minutes to get back to the trails. Oh, two flats on our way!